This week’s sudden, unheralded eruption of extreme violence pitting Israelis against Palestinians in Gaza could be seen as a metaphor for the socially splintered, economically turbulent and politically unpredictable year of 2008.
In geopolitical terms, the last 12 months often seemed akin to a man walking a tightrope, struggling for balance and progress while trying not to topple into the abyss. 2008 was a year of living dangerously. The portents it bears are even more daunting.
Nowhere is this more true than in Israel-Palestine.
Many look to Barack Obama for salvation. But as matters stand, the tightrope is wobbling wildly and the spectres of the abyss — an Israeli land invasion of Gaza, a wider war drawing in Hezbollah, Lebanon and Syria, or a direct Israeli confrontation with Iran — beckon dangerously.
If Middle East tensions had a familiar ring, 2008 also brought, for a short few weeks in August, a war in a different and unexpected quarter: the war between Russia and its former satellite, Georgia, over the two separatist entities of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The Georgian eruption had wide-ranging consequences. It embarrassingly exposed the disunity, rivalry and weakness that characterises an energy-dependent European Union in its dealings with Russia. And it placed on full display the emptiness of western security assurances to Georgia as Russian tanks rolled towards Tbilisi.
The war threw the already stalling process of Nato (and EU) eastwards enlargement into disarray, not just in Georgia but also in Ukraine, and left the Bush administration floundering for retaliatory options against Moscow.
But most of all it revealed the bellicosity and insecurity of a Kremlin leadership still apparently controlled by prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin.
For Russia’s neo-nationalists, 2008 marked a plunge back into the ”good old days” of Soviet imperialism. All the same, observers noted that Moscow had a point, even if it expressed it badly. Russian actions were linked to another seminal moment of 2008 — Kosovo’s prior, unilateral declaration of independence backed by the US and leading EU countries.
Russia and Serbia argued there was no justification in law for forcibly partitioning a sovereign state. Ten months on, most countries still decline to recognise Kosovo. It remains beholden for its security and survival to the EU, and to foreign troops. Kosovo also further complicated EU efforts to bring Serbia in from the cold, pacify the Balkans once and for all, and catch those most responsible for the internecine wars of the 1990s. 2008 saw the arrest of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. But the region’s most wanted man, Serb general Ratko Mladic, remains at large.
Further afield, 2008 saw a steady deterioration in the security situation in Afghanistan as the Taliban grew in confidence and coalition forces struggled to respond amid rising casualties.
Dismayingly for many, Afghanistan became not so much the holy war sought by Islamist extremists as a symbolic rallying point across the Middle East against foreign occupation.
Three developments pointed to even bigger problems ahead. One was the way the war spilled over into Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal areas, threatening further to destabilise the new elected government in Islamabad.
The second was a growing fear that spreading conflict in Afghanistan-Pakistan would eventually suck in the divided state of Kashmir and India itself.
That dread prospect moved closer when terrorists, believed to be based and trained in Pakistan, attacked tourist hotels in Mumbai. For a scary moment, the two nuclear-armed rivals seemed to totter on the brink of all-out war.
The third development concerned Nato itself. Afghanistan is its first major ”out of area” operation. But 2008 saw continuing bickering between the allies about troop numbers, caveats and levels of commitment. The once improbable question was raised: would Nato fail?
As the Afghan conflict grew in importance, that in Iraq subsided in relative terms. Obama’s campaign vow to bring the troops home by mid-2011 concentrated minds in Washington and Baghdad. Britain also confirmed it would pull out most troops by next summer.
But the fact that Iraq was moving down the West’s agenda did not mean its myriad problems had been resolved — far from it, despite fatuous ”Job Done!” headlines in British tabloids. Issues such as oil revenue sharing, the relationship between the Kurdish areas and the centre, Iranian influence-peddling, and the uncertain future of the US-armed Sunni ”Awakening” militias in a Shia-dominated state could all plunge the country back into sectarian strife.
The year marked the moment, in the view of many, when China came of age as a 21st-century superpower, via the lavish Beijing summer Olympics.
China’s brutal suppression of protests in Tibet and other ongoing human rights abuses failed to spoil the party.
According to monstrous legions of panicky economists, it was also the year that witnessed the biggest financial train wreck since the Wall Street crash. For the peoples of the west, it seemed, their savings, pensions and properties took precedence over all else.
Yet for the true meaning of disaster, it was only necessary to cast a glance over Africa. The people of Congo, Somalia and Sudan all struggled with security and humanitarian problems of epic proportions.
As 2008 ends, those problems seem to be appreciably worsening, especially in Somalia as the transitional government collapses and Ethiopian troops prepare to withdraw.
President Robert Mugabe’s blatant theft of Zimbabwe’s elections condemned the country to months of bloodshed, terror, hunger, mass migration and now a cholera epidemic.
The failure of South Africa and Southern African governments to contain or defuse the crisis blighted the year. Zimbabwe’s plight again raised fundamental questions about governance and legitimacy in post-colonial Africa. It underlined the basic impotence of the UN security council and other international institutions such as the African Union when faced with dictatorial regimes.
But it also illustrated another recurring theme of 2008 and previous years – the reluctance of the Western powers to become directly involved in countries or regions where their national security, geostrategic, or commercial and energy interests are not at stake.
Even in Gordon Brown’s brave new, joined-up, globalised world, the year’s events demonstrated that most of the time, in most places, collective, concerted international action either does not happen soon enough, does not happen at all, or does not work. As 2008, the year of living dangerously, draws to a close, it’s a sad certainty that many in Zimbabwe will not live to see 2009.
The mould-shattering 2008 US presidential election victory of an African-American, Barack Obama, offered a beacon of hope that remedies might at last begin to be found for some global problems.
Expectations are truly enormous. And they are truly worldwide.
Yet despite relentless media exposure, Obama also presented one of the greatest political enigmas of 2008 or any other year in recent memory. As the dust settled after the 2008 campaign, he remained a largely unknown quantity, his judgment, toughness, and staying power all as yet untested.
Only 2009 and subsequent years will show whether current optimism surrounding him is justified — and whether the world can begin to step back from the abyss. – guardian.co.uk